Of all the films in the world

IT's one of the most misquoted lines in movie history, in that Ingrid Bergman never asked Dooley Wilson to “play it again, Sam”. What she actually said, as any decent film buff knows, was: “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.” She was talking about the song As Time Goes By, which Humphrey Bogart had banned from his bar because it brought back painful memories. But if you buy Sam’s piano at Sotheby’s in New York next month you can play the tune as many times as you like.

It will cost you, mind. In 1988 the same piano was sold to a Japanese collector for £96,000, the highest price ever paid for a movie prop to date. This time it has a pre-sale estimate of £500,000 to £750,000.

If you don’t have that kind of cash to spare, you may have to console yourself with humming the tune.

The American Film Institute has ranked Casablanca the most romantic and most quotable movie of all time. It remains in that elite club of films regularly named as the best ever in audience polls, alongside Gone With The Wind, The Godfather and Citizen Kane, while the bestselling film-writing teacher Robert McKee says its screenplay is the greatest of all time.

But remarkably its success was largely an accident. Adapted by four different writers from an unpublished stage play, the script was still being written and revised while the scenes were being shot, so that Bergman never knew until she came to film the ending which of her two rival suitors her character would end up with.

No one making Casablanca thought they were making a great movi

US film critic Roger Ebert

There was no presiding “auteur” directing everyone according to a single clear vision and no one had any sense that they were working on anything extraordinary. The fact that the film succeeded at all is ­testament to collaborative effort. Too many cooks don’t always spoil the broth.

“No one making Casablanca thought they were making a great movie,” US film critic Roger Ebert has written.

“It was simply another Warner Bros release. It was an A-list picture to be sure. Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warner lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson. But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been and would be in dozens of films made under similar circumstances and the greatness of Casablanca was largely the result of happy chance.”

The film was based on a play called Everybody Comes To Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. It was inspired by a trip that Burnett, a schoolteacher, made to occupied Vienna in 1938 to help Jewish relatives. He also visited a nightclub on the French Riviera where a black pianist played jazz for a mix of French, Nazi and refugee customers. On his return to the US he started work on a play about a cynical American bar owner called Rick in Casablanca, Morocco, who eventually helps a Czech resistance fighter flee with the woman he himself loves.

The writers failed to find a Broadway producer but they did sell the play to Warner Bros for $20,000 – the most anyone in Hollywood had ever paid for an unproduced play. By this time it was January 1942, war in Europe was raging and the film studio’s story analyst reckoned there was an appetite for this “sophisticated hokum”.

Brothers Julius and Philip Epstein were asked to write the script. When they left the project to work on something else Howard Koch took over. The Epsteins supplied wit and cynicism – classic lines such as “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” – while Koch injected wartime patriotism. All three were credited but a fourth writer, Casey Robinson, also helped with rewrites. Julius Epstein later noted that the screenplay contained “more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works there’s nothing better”.

Filming took place over nine weeks in the summer of 1942, entirely in the studio apart from the final scene shot at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. The Lockheed plane visible in the background as Rick, played by Bogart, says goodbye to the Norwegian love of his life Ilsa Lund (Bergman) was actually a small-scale cardboard model and the technicians working around it were played by dwarves. Fog was added to help obscure this trickery.

The drama of the film turns on the desperate search by Ilsa’s ­husband Victor Laszlo (played by the Austrian actor Henreid, who did not get on with his fellow thespians) for the “letters of transit” that will allow him to escape to Allied territory. Rick has the power to help. But will Ilsa go with her husband and will Rick betray him? Will everything be scuppered by the Nazis? They were good questions – and the scriptwriters didn’t know the answer until the last moment. It was not surprising that Bergman didn’t either.

In the event, Rick shoots the top local Nazi, allowing Ilsa to escape with the man she doesn’t love. They have sacrificed their own individual happiness to the greater good of the resistance. The final line, where Rick tells the shamelessly corrupt French commander, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” was dubbed in later by Bogart because it wasn’t written until filming was over.

A s the fifth biggest box-office release of 1943 the picture was decently successful. It was ­nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture. But there were 10 films in that ­category and The Song Of Bernadette was the favourite. Casablanca’s Hungarian-born director Mike ­Curtiz, a nominee for the third time, hadn’t even prepared a speech.

When he won best director he said from the stage: “So many times I have a speech ready but no dice. Always a bridesmaid, never a mother. Now I win I have no speech.” It also took best picture and best script but even then it was not regarded as great. That only began in the Fifties when it became ­traditional to screen Casablanca during the week of final exams at Harvard University, a custom then emulated by other colleges.

It helped the movie grow in popularity while other films from the same era faded away. By the Seventies it had become the most frequently broadcast film on American television. Forty years later Julius Epstein stressed that Casablanca followed strict ­studio rules and didn’t remotely represent real life, either in the quotable wit of its ­characters or in the way they responded to events. “We weren’t making art, we were making a living,” he said.

But there is widespread agreement that, within the confines of Hollywood storytelling convention, it did as near a perfect job as could be done. As the great film critic Pauline Kael put it: “This was the best kind of Holly­wood product, the result of the teamwork of talented, highly paid professional hacks who were making a living, and we enjoyed it as a product and assumed that those involved in it enjoyed the money they made.”

Just one final caveat if you’re thinking of bidding at that auction: the piano in ­question was the one we saw Sam playing but it wasn’t the one that made the music.

Dooley Wilson was actually miming with his hands while a real pianist played another instrument just off screen. But that’s the magic of Hollywood for you.